Writing on HMI, autonomy, aviation, and product design
Writing on human-machine interface design, autonomous systems, aviation UX, and the craft of building safety-critical interfaces. By Dennis Schaefer, Design Director.
Flying a UAV is a physics problem before it's a machine learning problem. The hard part isn't the architecture. It's keeping training data physically honest, and giving the model enough context to keep reasoning correctly once the sensors go quiet.
I'm building pilot models right now, and the question I keep running into is how a model actually understands flight dynamics instead of pattern-matching them. Group 3/4/5 platforms with four electric rotors plus a pusher, then fixed-wing glide on top of that, aren't small variations on the same problem. The aerodynamics and failure modes are genuinely different across configurations, and everything below comes back to that.
Human-Machine Interface is giving way to something new. As AI takes over the doing, the interface between human and artificial intelligence becomes the most important surface in the system and the industry needs to caught up to what that actually requires.
Flying an aircraft and designing for one share more than you'd think. After earning my Private Pilot Licence, I've found the cockpit to be the most clarifying classroom in UX I've ever encountered.
Autonomous systems tend to be sold on what they can do without a human. But the most consequential design work happens in the gap between full automation and human intervention, the interface that connects them.
Fifteen years designing interfaces for some of the most complex systems humans have built has sharpened a few principles I now apply to every design problem, autonomous or otherwise.